Love Story, With Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

inquiries, public information appeals. Progress reports to RobertKirby, the
Detective Superintendent who has overall supervision of this investigation and is, in effect, Watkins’s boss for the duration. There’s also Interpol liaison, because of the Aussie
angle. Getting updates on anyone whose names cropped up in the first, 2005, phase of the Langton investigation.
    A communications blizzard. The nature of command.
    But eventually she’s done. Shehasn’t had any more sleep than I have, and she has that pink soap smell about her too. She looks at my jeans with taut disapproval but doesn’t
say anything. She’s wearing a grey woollen dress that she must have had ready in her office.
    ‘The leg was at the back of the freezer,’ I say, because it’s weird not saying anything.
    She looks at me, waiting, so I continue.
    ‘Mrs Williams wasonly an inch or so taller than me and arthritic. The freezer was almost a metre high and two feet deep. If I had to bundle a leg in there, I could probably manage it, but
I don’t think I could have laid it neatly along the bottom of the back wall unless I virtually climbed into the thing.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And the polythene didn’t match any of the other packages.’
    ‘I don’t think Elsie Williamsis our killer.’
    ‘Do we know if she left her garage unlocked? Or if any of the neighbours had a key?’
    Watkins raises a chin to acknowledge the questions. Those things might have been on her to-do list anyway.
    We’re off the motorway now, in the hills above Bath. Farmhouses and villages glimmering through the rain, then the long plunge downhill into the city.
    The driver lets the satnavguide him to an address just west of Victoria Park. Ordinary, pleasant streets. Watkins puts her BlackBerry away, braces herself for the brutal moment.
    She says nothing about how she wants to conduct the interview, but when she gets out of the car, I follow. She rings the doorbell. Lights on inside. Noise. A shape moves behind the door, then it
opens. A woman. Langton’s mother, dark hair,jeans, rugby top. Her face is composed in a ‘how can I help’ look, which collapses completely the moment she recognises Watkins.
    ‘Oh.’
    Nothing else. Just ‘Oh’. She takes us on wordlessly through to the kitchen. Same thing with her husband. The collapsing face, the wordlessness. A telly on in the background, which he
mutes.
    We sit down and Watkins says what she has to say.
    ‘I’msorry. Yesterday evening, DC Griffiths here was called to a house in Cardiff. We found some human remains, your daughter. We’ve been able to identify her from clothing and
DNA. I’m very sorry.’
    The husband has that numbed look. That thing where you’re only partly present in the room, where feelings and sounds and sensations all feel deadened, as if glimpsed through a glass wall.
That’sthe place where I’ve spent so much of my life: behind that wall, watching it thicken and cloud till I could hardly see through it at all.
    The wife, Mrs Langton, isn’t like that. She’s crying without sound, tears falling like sand. She has some instinct toward hospitality, and keeps starting to offer us a drink, but
never quite gets there. In the end, I get up, power off the TV and put thekettle on, then just stand behind her with my hands resting on her shoulders.
    I’m good in these situations because I don’t have normal feelings. I operate the way I usually do, relying on my brain more than my heart or instinct. Mrs Langton is sobbing now.
Noisy, juddering sobs. The sort you’re supposed to have at this kind of moment. I don’t intervene, just stand there and let her cry.Watkins and the husband make tea.
    When things are calmer, Watkins continues. Tells the truth. That we have a leg, not a daughter. That we can’t say how she died. That we can’t offer any comfort or close off any awful
possibility. That the worst of those possibilities are all too likely. Some sexual, sadistic, long-drawn-out weirdness